Day 53: hazelnut milk, busting the diet eating out

Eating out could be a killer: today we ate out 2 times, so we don’t have much of a clue how much cholesterol we ate, but an estimate shows my wife went above 200 mg, the recommended daily intake in order to lower your cholesterol strictly by controlling your dietary intake.

For breakfast I made hazelnut milk in stead of almond milk to add with my cooked oats. The nuts I bought are without skin and I added in weight: 9 parts of water to 1 part of nuts, in order to end up with milk containing an estimated 5% fat (normal supermarket bought cow’s full milk wil have about 3.6 to 3.8%).

On the Internet I read recipes that talked about 1 part nuts to 2 or 3 parts of water, which must end up in a very creamy drink. However, nuts aren’t that cheap either, and my ratio gave me a delicious drink already, added a bit of sugar that is.

I soaked my hazelnuts overnight, some recipes say you can blend them raw right away, other recipes don’t soak but roast the nuts first for 12 to 15 minutes in a pan and then start roasting.

For extra added flavor, I still need to try 2 recipes:

• adding cocoa powder
• adding nutmeg, cinnamon and cardamom (the recipe I found spoke of 1/4 teaspoon of each added to 6 cups or about 1.5 liter of milk.

For lunch we ate out: I had a bowl of chicken noodle soup and my wife had bah kuh teh. According to the nutrition.com.sg site: 1 serving of bah kut teh contains 162 mg of cholesterol, chicken noodle mushroom soup contains 72 mg cholesterol.

For dinner again we ate out: nothing planned, just running here and there the whole day ending up having no time, no energy and no desire to cook. Pandan leaf chicken, sambal belacan asparagus and papaya salad.

• Pandan leaf chicken: according to cookeatshare.com, for about 300 grams (10 oz) you consume about 116 mg cholesterol. According to caloriecount.com 1 serving of 140 g of chicken breast has 119 mg of cholesterol. Lets use the latter number for our estimation.
• The papaya salad is cholesterol free, just make sure not to eat the dry shrimps.
• For the sambal belacan asparagus: belacan is fermented shrimp, so it’s not clear how much cholesterol you add up consuming here. Again we made sure not to eat the few cooked shrimps added in the dish and tend to believe that chili lowers bad cholesterol 🙂 Actually I made a mistake: to have this dish completely cholesterol free, I should have asked the veggies to be prepared with garlic.

Total cholesterol intake today: me about 191 mg, my wife about 281 mg

• breakfast: 0 mg
• lunch: 72 mg from chicken meat
• dinner: 119 mg from chicken

Now 191 mg is just an estimate. We don’t know how many mg we really consumed, as restaurants "just serve you the food" without any further ado about the nutritional values. All you can do is try to choose the food that seemingly should contain the least cholesterol, in my case lots of chicken.

Do notice my wife opting for a pork dish for lunch with double the amount of cholesterol (141mg) so only 59 left to reach the daily limit of 200. Eating in at home would have been still manageable to keep under the 200mg limit.

However a second meal eaten out, and the diet got busted. This just shows you how easy it is to go beyond the daily recommended cholesterol intake when you eat out twice a day. (add to that for breakfast nasi lemak and a late supper, and you could easily eating out 4 times a day…welcome to life in Asia.)

If you wonder why our LDL cholesterol went through the roof, I think we found the answer: eating out without taking prisoners, not to mention going for late supper, not to mention the normally added drink of "teh tarik" containing an nice amount of condensed milk. For now any cow’s milk is banned in my diet, and as seen in my last blood test, I am doing fine in reducing my LDL after changing my diet.